About
The Cornell Phonetics Lab is a group of students and faculty who are curious about speech. We study patterns in speech — in both movement and sound. We do a variety research — experiments, fieldwork, and corpus studies. We test theories and build models of the mechanisms that create patterns. Learn more about our Research. See below for information on our events and our facilities.
Upcoming Events
29th September 2025 12:20 PM
PhonDAWG - Phonetics Lab Data Analysis Working Group
Tran will present her Q-paper experiment design.
Location: B11 Morrill Hall, 159 Central Avenue, Morrill Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853-4701, USA
1st October 2025 12:20 PM
Phonetics Lab Meeting
We will read this recent paper by Dr. Gaja Jarosz, in preparation for her Colloquium talk on Thursday and her informal Phonetics Lab talk on Friday.
Location: B11 Morrill Hall, 159 Central Avenue, Morrill Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853-4701, USA
2nd October 2025 04:30 PM
Colloquium Talk Series - Gaja Jarosz
The Cornell Linguistics Department is proud to present Dr. Gaja Jarosz, Professor of Linguistics at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who will give a talk titled: "Productivity and Lexical Specificity in Morphophonological Learning".
Abstract:
Morphophonological learning involves the acquisition of an interactive system of productive generalizations along with morpheme-specific and lexically-specific knowledge.
Acquisition of this complex system of knowledge proceeds on the basis of noisy, incomplete, and ambiguous linguistic input. Due to recent developments in statistical, computational modeling of morphophonological learning, there now exist numerous approaches for learning of various kinds of hidden morphophonological structure from incomplete, unlabeled, and noisy data.
These computational models make it possible to connect the full representational richness of phonological theory with noisy, ambiguous corpus data representative of language learners' linguistic experience to make detailed and experimentally testable predictions about language learning and generalization.
In this talk, I discuss several ongoing projects that utilize these mutually-informing connections between statistical learning, phonological theory, and experimental data to test hypotheses about the cognitive representations that underlie morphophonological and lexical knowledge.
These projects seek to bring new sources of evidence to bear on long-standing theoretical debates by differentiating and testing the predictions of distinct theoretical proposals and learning mechanisms.
Focusing on several case studies examining the interactions between morphophonological and lexical learning, I demonstrate how statistical learning models can formalize the link between linguistic theory and the distributional properties of the learner’s input.
These direct links allow for detailed examination of each theory’s precise predictions for a wide range of empirical phenomena, including the time course of acquisition, generalization to novel items and contexts, as well as online lexical and morphological processing.
Speaker Bio:
Gaja Jarosz works in the areas of phonological theory, computational linguistics, and language learning and development. Her research seeks to better understand how natural language sound systems and their acquisition by children can be formally and computationally characterized.
She received her MA and PhD in Cognitive Science from The Johns Hopkins University and her BA in Mathematics and Social Thought & Analysis from Washington University in St. Louis.
Location: 106 Morrill Hall, Cornell University, 159 Central Avenue, Morrill Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853-4701, USA
3rd October 2025 11:10 AM
Informal talk by Dr. Gaja Jarosz
Dr. Gaja Jarosz will hold an informal talk focused on this recent paper:
Location: B11 Morrill Hall, 159 Central Avenue, Morrill Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853-4701, USA
Facilities
The Cornell Phonetics Laboratory (CPL) provides an integrated environment for the experimental study of speech and language, including its production, perception, and acquisition.
Located in Morrill Hall, the laboratory consists of six adjacent rooms and covers about 1,600 square feet. Its facilities include a variety of hardware and software for analyzing and editing speech, for running experiments, for synthesizing speech, and for developing and testing phonetic, phonological, and psycholinguistic models.
Web-Based Phonetics and Phonology Experiments with LabVanced
The Phonetics Lab licenses the LabVanced software for designing and conducting web-based experiments.
Labvanced has particular value for phonetics and phonology experiments because of its:
- *Flexible audio/video recording capabilities and online eye-tracking.
- *Presentation of any kind of stimuli, including audio and video
- *Highly accurate response time measurement
- *Researchers can interactively build experiments with LabVanced's graphical task builder, without having to write any code.
Students and Faculty are currently using LabVanced to design web experiments involving eye-tracking, audio recording, and perception studies.
Subjects are recruited via several online systems:
- * Prolific and Amazon Mechanical Turk - subjects for web-based experiments.
- * Sona Systems - Cornell subjects for for LabVanced experiments conducted in the Phonetics Lab's Sound Booth
Computing Resources
The Phonetics Lab maintains two Linux servers that are located in the Rhodes Hall server farm:
- Lingual - This Ubuntu Linux web server hosts the Phonetics Lab Drupal websites, along with a number of event and faculty/grad student HTML/CSS websites.
- Uvular - This Ubuntu Linux dual-processor, 24-core, two GPU server is the computational workhorse for the Phonetics lab, and is primarily used for deep-learning projects.
In addition to the Phonetics Lab servers, students can request access to additional computing resources of the Computational Linguistics lab:
- *Badjak - a Linux GPU-based compute server with eight NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080Ti GPUs
- *Compute server #2 - a Linux GPU-based compute server with eight NVIDIA A5000 GPUs
- *Oelek - a Linux NFS storage server that supports Badjak.
These servers, in turn, are nodes in the G2 Computing Cluster, which currently consists of 195 servers (82 CPU-only servers and 113 GPU servers) consisting of ~7400 CPU cores and 698 GPUs.
The G2 Cluster uses the SLURM Workload Manager for submitting batch jobs that can run on any available server or GPU on any cluster node.
Articulate Instruments - Micro Speech Research Ultrasound System
We use this Articulate Instruments Micro Speech Research Ultrasound System to investigate how fine-grained variation in speech articulation connects to phonological structure.
The ultrasound system is portable and non-invasive, making it ideal for collecting articulatory data in the field.
BIOPAC MP-160 System
The Sound Booth Laboratory has a BIOPAC MP-160 system for physiological data collection. This system supports two BIOPAC Respiratory Effort Transducers and their associated interface modules.
Language Corpora
- The Cornell Linguistics Department has more than 915 language corpora from the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC), consisting of high-quality text, audio, and video corpora in more than 60 languages. In addition, we receive three to four new language corpora per month under an LDC license maintained by the Cornell Library.
- This Linguistic Department web page lists all our holdings, as well as our licensed non-LDC corpora.
- These and other corpora are available to Cornell students, staff, faculty, post-docs, and visiting scholars for research in the broad area of "natural language processing", which of course includes all ongoing Phonetics Lab research activities.
- This Confluence wiki page - only available to Cornell faculty & students - outlines the corpora access procedures for faculty supervised research.
Speech Aerodynamics
Studies of the aerodynamics of speech production are conducted with our Glottal Enterprises oral and nasal airflow and pressure transducers.
Electroglottography
We use a Glottal Enterprises EG-2 electroglottograph for noninvasive measurement of vocal fold vibration.
Real-time vocal tract MRI
Our lab is part of the Cornell Speech Imaging Group (SIG), a cross-disciplinary team of researchers using real-time magnetic resonance imaging to study the dynamics of speech articulation.
Articulatory movement tracking
We use the Northern Digital Inc. Wave motion-capture system to study speech articulatory patterns and motor control.
Sound Booth
Our isolated sound recording booth serves a range of purposes--from basic recording to perceptual, psycholinguistic, and ultrasonic experimentation.
We also have the necessary software and audio interfaces to perform low latency real-time auditory feedback experiments via MATLAB and Audapter.
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